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Elie Wiesel/Transcript
Transcript Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim and Moby. A boy, Tim, and a robot, Moby, are visiting the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts. Rows upon rows of numbers are engraved on a tall stone column. TIM: Each of these numbers represents a Jewish person killed during the Holocaust. MOBY: Beep. Moby hands Tim a typed letter. Tim reads from it. TIM: Dear Tim and Moby, Can you please make a movie about our grandfather, Elie Wiesel? From, Elijah and Shira. TIM: Thanks for the suggestion, guys. Everyone could learn from your grandfather's story. An image shows an elderly Elie Wiesel. Text reads: Elie Wiesel (1928-2016). TIM: Elie Wiesel was an author, educator, and humanitarian. He's most well-known for writing about the horrors of the Holocaust. MOBY: Beep. TIM: The systematic murder of millions of people during World War II. Adolf Hitler directed the extermination of those he considered undesirable. He was the dictator of Germany during the 1930s and World War II. An animation shows Adolf Hitler reviewing his soldiers as they march past him in formation. He gives the Nazi salute. TIM: Hitler's political party, the Nazis, rose to power by turning people against certain minority groups. An animation shows a German man in the 1930s reading an anti-Jewish poster posted on the side of a building. The man then frowns and walks angrily down the sidewalk. TIM: The Nazis' main targets were Jewish people, like Wiesel. The man in the animation stops in front of a Jewish bakery and throws a rock through its front window. Inside the bakery, a clerk and a customer cringe and duck at the sound of breaking glass. TIM: Hitler claimed that they were destroying Germany. But his real motivation was simple anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews. The clerk opens the bakery's front door and looks around for the person who threw the rock. Jewish people walk by, going about their business, looking worried. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Jews and other undesirables were sent to huge outdoor prisons. Inmates in these concentration camps lived in brutal conditions. An animation shows Nazi soldiers locking a Jewish family in a train car packed with other Jews. The train takes them to a concentration camp at night. It is raining. TIM: They spent their days doing hard labor, and their nights crammed inside unheated sheds. An animation shows concentration camp inmates digging holes and pushing wheelbarrows filled with dirt. They are barefoot, wearing black-and-white striped uniforms. One inmate collapses from exhaustion and falls on the wheelbarrow he is pushing. TIM: They were kept on a starvation diet and lived under constant threat of violence from armed guards. A prison guard approaches the collapsed inmate and begins beating him. TIM: Prisoners were routinely humiliated, beaten, and killed for no reason at all. Those who could no longer work were sent to death camps, where they were executed. An animation shows a smoking chimney. MOBY: Beep. Moby is horrified. TIM: Only one out of three European Jews made it to the end of the war. That's when the world learned how six million Jews had died in the camps. A new word entered the language – genocide, the extermination of an entire group of people. A circle graph displays a breakdown of the different groups killed by the Nazis. A second image lists numbers of Holocaust fatalities within various groups. In addition to Jews, the chart gives the numbers of Freemasons, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses, among others, who were murdered. TIM: As a survivor, Wiesel knew that facts and figures didn't communicate the horror of what had happened. An animation shows a hand closing a book entitled: Statistics of the Holocaust. MOBY: Beep. TIM: The Wiesels were captured in Romania in 1944. A map shows the location of Sighet, Romania in Eastern Europe. TIM: Elie spent a year of his youth in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald camps. The map shows the location of Auschwitz in Poland, and Buchenwald in Nazi Germany. TIM: American troops liberated Buchenwald in 1945, when Elie was 16. His father had died in the camp just a few weeks before. MOBY: Beep. TIM: For years, Wiesel struggled with his feelings about the experience. An animation shows Wiesel as a young adult after the war. He is riding silently on a train, sad and thoughtful. TIM: Why had he survived while so many others had been erased? Wiesel dozes off as the train moves along and has a nightmare about the train that took his family to the concentration camp when he was young. TIM: The memories of what he had endured haunted him. Wiesel awakens in a panic. TIM: But he couldn't find the words to speak or write of his experience. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Like so many other survivors, Wiesel tried to focus on his day-to-day life. He lived in France after the war, working as a journalist. Finally, a friend convinced him that his story needed to be told. An animation shows Wiesel walking into a French bookstore. TIM: Wiesel's first attempt was an 800-page memoir, or personal account. An animation shows Wiesel giving his book to a cashier who is seated at a desk. The cashier examines the work as Wiesel looks on, smiling. The cover of the book displays its title in Yiddish. TIM: It was written in Yiddish, a language spoken pretty much only by European Jews. That, plus its length, kept it from making an impact beyond the Jewish community. The cashier examines the book quizzically as Wiesel's smile fades. The cashier hands the book back to Wiesel. TIM: So he pared it down to 120 pages, and he wrote it in French. An animation shows Wiesel returning to the bookstore with his new version of the book. The cashier examines it, smiling. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Unlike his original book, Night wasn't a step-by-step account. Instead, it focuses on a handful of powerful experiences. They're told from the point of view of the teenaged Wiesel, known as Eliezer to his family. An image shows the second version of Wiesel's book, with a French cover showing an illustration of two Jews standing behind a barbed-wire fence. An animation shows a line of Jewish men in a concentration camp, having numbers tattooed on their forearms. TIM: The first-person account lets you see the camp from a prisoner's perspective. You experience its horrors as if living them yourself and feel the victims' sense of helpless suffering. An animation shows Eliezar's view of entering the concentration camp. His numbers are A-7713. Prisoners march as Nazi soldiers yell at them. MOBY: Beep. TIM: As its title suggests, Night is about an unstoppable darkness. Through Eliezer, we watch as it blots out the joys of normal life. An animation shows Jewish families in a train car, headed for a concentration camp. It is dark, sad, and silent. TIM: Social ties between prisoners quickly dissolve. Packed on a train heading to the camps, they are warned by a guard, if anyone escapes, the entire group will be executed. A guard shouts his warning to the prisoners in the train car. TIM: In this way, the prisoners become their own guards. The guard slams the door of the train car closed. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Even family connections come under assault. Men and women are separated and sent into different camps. An animation shows Eliezar's view of the procedure. His mother and sister wave goodbye to him and his father as they are sent to a different camp. TIM: That's the last time Eliezer ever sees his mother and younger sister. He lies about his age so he can stay with his father in the men's camp. But their connection starts to fray under the constant stress of fear and hunger. An animation shows a frowning Nazi guard, who is keeping watch over the prisoners. TIM: Eliezer witnesses fathers and sons fighting over scraps of food. The guard watches as a son refuses to give his father some of the bread he is eating. TIM: And he himself fails to do anything when a guard attacks his own father. An animation shows a Nazi guard attacking an elderly man as he sits on the ground, eating. MOBY: Beep. TIM: The constant brutality isolates Eliezer and changes him at a basic level. An animation shows concentration camp inmates standing outside in the cold, as flakes of snow drift to the ground. They are watching a fellow inmate be hanged. TIM: Once deeply religious, he begins to question his faith. At first, he feels anger toward God. Why was He letting this suffering continue? He hears another prisoner ask, "Where is God now?" Eventually, Eliezer comes to believe that the Nazis weren't just killing Jews. They were killing Judaism, and God Himself. An animation shows a teenaged Eliezer, standing in the midst of a group of older concentration camp inmates in the cold and snow, in the aftermath of the hanging. TIM: God had been central to Eliezer's identity. Before his capture, he says praying is as important as breathing. Inside the camps, that reason to breathe is nearly destroyed. MOBY: Beep. An animation shows the rundown barracks of the concentration camp. The snow is falling more heavily now. TIM: Even with nothing left to live for, Eliezer perseveres. How or why is something he doesn't understand at the time. But over the years, Wiesel began to see that he had survived for a reason, to preserve the memory of the Holocaust in all its painful detail. He went on to write dozens of books and essays, many of them wrestling with the themes he first explored in Night. He helped establish the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and he inspired other survivors to record their stories for future generations. Images show shelves of books and the Holocaust Museum. An animation shows an elderly female Holocaust survivor telling her story. TIM: Perhaps most importantly, Wiesel dedicated himself to stopping new genocides. From Southeast Asia to Europe and Africa, he refused to let the world look away, or to forget. His tireless work won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. In his acceptance speech, he said, "I swore never to be silent whenever, wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation." An animation shows an elderly Wiesel accepting his Nobel prize. TIM: Elie Wiesel kept that pledge for the rest of his life. He died in 2016. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Well, we can all do our part in small ways, even us kids. Speak up for someone getting bullied, or reach out to someone who's alone. Simple acts of kindness can change the world, if enough of us step forward to help. Text on the monument behind Tim and Moby reads: We cannot give evil another chance – Elie Wiesel. Category:BrainPOP Transcripts